Last week I talked about what I was doing with my own money, and how looking at a company's 5500 filings can shed some light on which stocks might be a good bet.
And that's really all investing is, isn't it? Betting. You bet for a company's star to rise and against their CEO getting arrested in an arson probe. Buying a stock is not much different from playing blackjack, and just like learning to count cards, there are ways to up your chances of, maybe not hitting big, but at least hitting smartly.
We used the data behind FreeERISA to take a look at every 2010 form 5500 filing that had been made thus far, nearly 150,000.
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Then we broke it out by companies who are managing their own retirement assets in trusts – and thus have some control over the money and the investment decisions – then finally applied our proprietary Diamond Metrics to find the companies with the ten best rates of return on their investments, focusing exclusively on those you can "bet on" (read: invest in).
The list is below. I've shown the actual rate of return as well as the amount of retirement assets each company's trusts held at the end of the year.
These are all solid bets. They're companies that have made long-term commitments to the futures of their employees, and managed those commitments carefully and successfully.
What do you think? Did I beat the house?
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